Monday, August 20, 2012

Cocaine?!

New country, new stories, but first old stories about the old country. And in this case by old I mean the last one, Suriname. The issue I talked about has been formally resolved, although I feel like there's still some kind of tension. But I guess that's normal, it's always been like that on every longer group trip I've been on. They're still fun - as long as there's an end date. This morning we went back to the chinese supermarket we'd already gone to last night. When I say we at the moment I mean Susanne, Giuliana and me, we're sharing a room* at the moment. We all love it (the supermarket, not the room), because it's not like the other 500.000 chinese supermarkets in Suriname - it's light, it's clean, the things are in shelves and not on the floor around the shelves and there are fresh products too (dairy and fruit, etc). And they have Milo! Milo!!! I love Milo. A lot. *This is our "room". Supposedly it's for three people. And it worked out for the three of us, but only because we knew it was for one single night and not a moment longer:

But now back to the supermarket and it's interesting contents. What we got this morning, though, was something special. We went and got cocaine. Yes, cocaine. But not really, here's what I'm talking about:

We simply had to get this stuff, we didn't even care if it was going to be good or not, simply because it was so funny to be able to say that we'd gone and bought cocaine - something none of us would ever really do. The best about the drink is the small print right under the name, you have to read this! "This product does not contain the drug cocaine (duh)." Love it!! We both tried the red drink first and were confused and a bit weirded out by the fact that our throats and tongues started burning after drinking a little bit of it and that it was painful (really) to breathe in with the stuff close to the mouth. Our problem was that, what with paying so much attention to the small print, we hadn't paid attention to another part of the small print, the one at the bottom of the can:

Spicy Hot. What the hell? Who does that? Who makes a spicy hot energy drink?! Of course, the people who put spicy hot into everything they eat and drink and Suriname seems to be full of people like that, or at least that's the impression I've gotten at lunches and dinners - and today's breakfast (no, the one in the hotel, not this part of it). It was extremely funny to me, because the red one was actually Giuliana's and not mine, so I didn't have to deal with it. She ended up throwing away the almost full can, because she wasn't able to drink it. Mine, the blue one, wasn't much better, but at least it didn't hurt to drink it so I finished it and then had some water to get rid of the taste. But it really was quite the experience, I just know for sure that I will never ever try cocaine again, ever. The only thing available in a can that can make for a good morning, at least in my book:

After breakfast, we took to the road and slowly worked our way towards Guyana, because the bordertown of Nieuw Nickerie had been the last stop in Suriname. First, we took a minibus to the Courantyne River, where we had to buy the ferry ticket and go through customs and migrations and then wait for the ferry. Our professor had said it would leave at 11AM, the lady at the hotel had said it would leave at noon. It actually left at 1PM. That's South America for you, if you're not patient you won't get far. Or, well you might get far, but you won't be very happy for a long time. On the other side of the river we officially entered Guyana and got pretty little stamps into our passports, then exchanged Suriname Dollars for Guyana Dollars and took another minibus-taxi-thing to Georgetown. That was quite the drive as the guy who drove us had originally planned to take his family, who had also been on the ferry with us, to Georgetown and Linden, and then he ended up putting them onto other buses and taking us. I'm not really sure how that worked out for him, because he might have had a private car there and not really a taxi or bus. And how much can he have earned from charging us 2.000 Guyana Dollars each, if he had to pay for his nephews' bus trips? 'Cos there were a lot of nephews... but, whatever, we got to Georgetown after a while so, at least for us, it's all good. Now we're here, we got money and rooms and had dinner and figured out what time it is and when we have to get up tomorrow, but there aren't really any more stories to tell from today. It's been uneventful ever since we crossed that border... hm. And I also haven't seen enough of Georgetown to be able to tell you anything about the city... I really just wanted to talk about cocaine, is all. Maybe tomorrow will be more interesting, maybe we'll find more not-really-drugs. For now, I leave you with the same words Suriname saw us off with:

See you soon.

PS: I am really here now, I just logged into CouchSurfing and once the CS login is done is when I feel I've really arrived at a place.